Bonnie and Clyde
During the mid 60's Hollywood had gone into an identity crisis. With the new wave films of Europe exploding onto the screen and introducing a new film style of on-location shooting and realism; the Golden Age Hollywood of yesteryear had come to an end. What emerged from the ashes of the Golden Age Hollywood was a mixture of new wave art movements and the studio system called: New Hollywood. This gave new, hip young talent a shot at artistic freedom that was earlier controlled by business men who thought they "knew what the public wanted". The first film to completely capitalize on the changes swooping through Hollywood was Bonnie and Clyde.
The script was written by two young and inexperienced men who just wanted to see if they could adapt two notoriously well known American crime figures to the silver screen. At first the script was very raw and not very fleshed out, but would later find itself in the hands of two very important figures: Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, french cinema gods who championed the new wave movement. These two men help the inexperienced script writers and doctored the script into a ravishing masterpiece.
With the script coming into its own the studio still had very little faith in the film. They gave it a "B-movie" status and very small budget, stating that it was an "experimental film" that would gather no audience because of its glorification of violent crime and an unsatisfying ending. The studio would soon be proven wrong.
The film was released to a very mixed audience. Older viewers found the movie appalling and anarchic. Most film critics shunned the film as being very amateurish and much too violent. The true audience demographic lay with the younger adult crowd. It was a reflection of what the youth of America was feeling at the time of Vietnam War and protest. Violence was at the center of the American psyche and only the youth was willing to connect those dots and understand the implications that New Hollywood directors were trying to get across.
The true impact of the film was through the overtly anticlimactic, gory ending. The blend of Oscar winning cinematography and newly developed "jump cut" editing would throw the ending death scene so shockingly in the audiences face that some viewers we reported to have left the theater. It was the ending that had Bonnie and Clyde etched in the minds of American film-goers as a clear warning sign that Hollywood was changing.
